A few days ago – Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi unveiled several made in India semiconductor chips. These chips are mostly the product of academic research groups. They demonstrate the design skills of academic institutions and the fabrication capabilities of SCL. They are a show of India’s strategic capabilities.
We should all thank Hon Prime Minister for raising the status of Indian semiconductor industry. Soon other players will join SCL and India’s foundry ecosystem will evolve.
The biggest beneficiaries will be the states that focus on Fabless System-On-Chip startups (SoC). The concept of SoC is not new and had been the mainstay of semiconductor chip design since late 90’s.
The basic idea is simple – a new startup thinks about a whole new experience that can be delivered to a large or important market and designs an efficient solution using SoC technology.
The SoC industry is extremely competitive and the cost of entry is a barrier.
The transition from “University chip design projects” to successful “business models” is almost impossible!
There are a diminishing number of SoC firms in the world today. The largest of them Nvidia packs thousands of processing cores into a single chip.
How can Indian states form a semiconductor policy that creates a new Nvidia or Huawei from their state? Clearly getting Cadence and Synopsis tools for free under DLI will make little difference. These very tools are available for SoC firms in Silicon Valley or Beijing even before the odd SoC startup in Guwahati or Surat gets to see these tools.
Recently Tamil Nadu – which is amongst India’s progressive States when it comes to industry support has announced that it will offer 50% of wage bill to SoC startups as incentives.
This shows that Indian states understand the opportunity.
The real question? Coming up with a winning strategy.
A winning strategy depends on facilitation by state governments (say a 10,000 square feet building made available for SoC startups and a Rs 10 crore seed fund) and any financial incentives – combined with availability of next generation System Design Automation platforms that offer significant designer productivity boost as compared to the existing EDA platforms from Synopsys or Cadence.
That small SoC that changes the world as Hon PM Modi envisioned can be designed in your state.
